Today's Hardware Friday post comes to us via Paolo Patierno. Paolo chats up one of my favorite hardware projects of the past year and highlights a recent post by Scott Walker.

Scott and community team have proven the power of open source and gone where Microsoft hasn't yet. They taken the open source .Net Micro Framework SDK and unofficially, experimentally, updated it to work with Visual Studio 2013.

Recent coverage (can you tell this is toward the top of my cool project list?

The Secret Labs, makers of the famous series of Netduino boards and AGENT smartwatch based on .Net Micro Framework, could not wait for an official release by Microsoft and has decided to make available an experimental SDK for Visual Studio 2013 !

Chris Walker has disclosed the news on the official forum and explained that he had used the open source code of .NET Micro Framework to generate this SDK that will no longer be supported by the Secret Labs when Microsoft will release the official one.

Obviously, I have not been able to wait and after installing Visual Studio 2013 I downloaded the SDK to be able to try a simple application on my Netduino Plus board. In addition to the .NET Micro Framework SDK, it is also needed to download and install the Secret Labs SDK, also experimental for Visual Studio 2013.

SDK .Net Micro Framework 4.3 (RTM) and SDK Netduino boards

The SDK installer is related to the .NET Micro Framework 4.3 (RTM) version and it is perfectly identical to the official as well as throughout the installation process.

Visual Studio 2013 is awesome. Yet plug-ins for our favorite Visual Studio extensions--like .NET Micro Framework support--are often on their own release cycles. So we patiently wait for the extensions to catch up, eager to use the latest tools.

Luckily, .NET Micro Framework is open source. So we've built an experimental NETMF SDK installer that works with the latest version of Visual Studio.

I'm happy to announce experimental support for Visual Studio 2013. This also includes special builds of the Netduino and AGENT SDKs.

Disclaimer: Not an official Microsoft SDK installer. For experimentation purposes only.

A few notes

We will support users on the official SDK (using VS2012) as well as users on the experimental SDK (using VS2013).

Once the NETMF SDK is updated to support VS2013+ we will discontinue the experimental SDK installer.

The experimental NETMF installer is identical to the standard installer--but built for VS2013 and not signed.

In summaryEnjoy the experimental VS2013 support! Please post any feedback here in this post.

And happy holidays!Chris

P.S. Thank you to Jan Kučera for all your tinkering with the .NET MF SDK WiX sources and for your community contributions; you got us started on this update path.

As he notes, this is only for the cutting/bleeding edge developer, and again, is not official, but if you like living on the edge and you hate leaving your VS2013, this might be something for you to check out.

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